Unexpected Sunderland accent
Paris Hilton’s genius has always been as an example of bourgeois excess – a kind of perfect pointlessness that isn’t even an aristocratic sovereignty or a Bataillean general economy (Paris Hilton as voyou désÅ“uvré? Sounds like a Thesis You Should Write). So she’s rather ruined things by releasing a fairly good pop reggae record![[MP3]](/res/MP3.png "Download MP3 file")
. What with this and the last Sugababes album, the Ace Of Bass comeback can’t be far away.
Even more unexpected, though, is that she’s also recorded a track that sounds a great deal like Kenickie (well, if there’d always been a disco element to their music, anyway). Admittedly, there’s no actual Sunderland accent, but her vocal stylings are remarkably reminiscent of a young Lauren Laverne.
“I was saying we’ll be just fine, if you just leave the thinking to me”
Things which aren’t exactly theses, but which nevertheless you should write. I don’t imagine my co-editors at Critical Sense are familiar with the works of Girls@Play, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to persuade them to title an issue “‘He watches TV, I read my books’: Why Academics Observe Pop Culture.” Although, we’ve just got a new computer and we can finally print háÄ?eks, so maybe we should do a Žižek special issue. We could accept one article and print it four times.
Meanwhile, in honor of Daphne and Celeste’s “Never Been to Memphis”, someone should write an attack on the Democrats’ turn to “values” called “Eww, we’re in Kansas,” while somebody else (possibly me) should write a history of the relationship between the DIY protest movement (Earth First!, Reclaim the Streets, etc) and the traditional left called “Marching in Line, What Are You, Sheep? Do You Need to be Told How to Move to the Beat?”
And “Star Club” is obviously one of the finest records ever recorded.
The sex appeal of the inorganic
Like k-punk, I’d not been terribly impressed by the dubstep I’d heard up to know, until I heard the mix he points to by Autonomic. What I’d missed, and what this mix makes clear, is the relationship of dubstep to previous forms of dance music. My favorite track, at about 30 minutes in, weaves a muted classic hardcore melody into miscellaneous industrial sounds and an incredibly throbbing bassline. At first I found this beautiful but depressing, a kind of mourning for a dance music that’s now been lost. But it occours to me that it’s actually something much more interesting, because dubstep isn’t just related to an unreachable, lost, past, but to a much more immediate past, too. Dubstep effects a detournement of 2-step and, crucially, operates by taking what was most regressive in 2-step and the late UK Garage of the Dreem Team and others, and repurposing it.
“Soul” is the enemy of dance music, a return to ideologies of the organic, natural and “authentic” from which machines were supposed to have liberated us. Dubstep confronts the organicism which has captured much recent dance music, but not by a simple negation, an blunt excision of the human which would be ultimately sterile. Rather, dubstep’s reverberating alien bass, its disconnected fragments of treble, and its formless clatter of rhythms, combine to turn the organic inside out. Dubstep presents us with the perverse inorganic organicism of the machine.
This procedure should be an inspiration to revolutionaries. I’m reminded of Badiou’s remark that anti-capitalists are not simply opponents of capitalism, but more importantly rivals.
Leaving aside my continuing ideological objections
Not so long ago, I had curious desire to listen to some indie music; I’m not sure if it was reading Questionable Content or seeing Arab Strap (only at an instore thing, unfortunately, but they were still great, and their latest album is really excellent). Anyway, I don’t own that much indie, particularly not anything more recent than Britpop, so I turned to the internet, which supplied me with two radio streams, the distressingly cute Japanese nonstep and the stylish Italian Pig Radio. Here is some of what I listened to:
- The Gentle Waves - Falling From Grace
- The side project of Belle from Belle and Sebastian. This is really surprisingly good, especially as Belle and Sebastian are one of the worst bands in the world; winsome, “ironic,” proudly disfunctional. But this sounds not unlike an indie “No Regrets” by Girls Aloud, and the Gentle Waves have another track that sounds like Camera Obscura, so they’re doing pretty well.
- Sekiden - 1+1=Heartache
- A bit like Helen Love, if they were fans of 80s commercial rock instead of the Ramones.
- Sambassadeur - Between the Lines
- It turns out the Swedish do Scottish indie at least as well as the Scots. A little like the Cardigans were back when they were indie; only more indie.
- Souvenir - Amour et Degout
- A Spanish band singing songs in the style of French pop from the 60s. That’s really quite indie.
- Edith Frost - Easy to Love
- Country, or alt. country, perhaps, if that’s what it’s called. Anyway, I’d tentatively propose as a rule that country songs sung by women are all brilliant, and country songs sung by men are all terrible (with a possible exception clause for Boxcar Willie).
- Les Ondes Martenot - Colores
- Absolutely beautiful. The Chilean Delgados, more or less, and at least as good as that sounds.
Also on an indie tip, Laura recently(ish) posted some MP3s of her band, Operation Wolf, who are very good, very John Peel. I’m not sure what the prospects are like for “very John Peel” bands, these days, I fear it’s a harder niche to succeed in than it used to be, what with the absence of John Peel, and everything.
Indie bands: why not try recording a cover of SL2’s “On a Ragga Tip,” complete with “ironic” rapping? It would be dreadful, and possibly racist, but I bet it it would get you played on Zane Lowe.
Listening
A propos of nothing in particular, here’s what I put on my MP3 player when I went away the other week:
- Alabama 3 - Outlaw
- More directly country-acid-house than their last one (I mean, their last proper album; obviously it’s more acid house than the acoustic album). “Last Train to Mashville” is particularly good.
- Girls Aloud - Chemistry
- I’m belatedly realizing that the video for “See The Day” was really good. As is the video for “Whole Lotta History.”
- Tatu - Dangerous and Moving
- For non-native speakers of English, they have some great lyrics. I realize F. R. Leavis is, strictly speaking, dead, but I’m considering convoking a seance in order to get a New Critical interpretation of “Cosmos”.
- DJ Whoo Kid and DJ E-Rock - Bay Bidness
- A Bay Area mixtape which features a great track from Hoodstarz which introduced me to the expression “Get your grown man on,” i.e., dress up in proper clothes. Also, the splendid E (or X, or purple, as the Americans call it) fueled R&B lightness of J. Valentine’s “Go Dumb”. Also, E-40’s “Tell Me When to Go,” which has a great Oakland-set video.
- Ghostface Killa - Fishscale
- The absurdly sentimental Ghostface Killa is as good as ever. Features a song about getting beaten by his mother which is all upbeat soul-samples and heartbreaking lyrics.
- Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones
- I thought this was a bit blah when I first heard it, but it’s really grown on me. Manages to be both surprisingly conventional and more experimental than most of the British neo-post-punk I’ve heard.
I also listened to a podcast of Mark Lawson interviewing Orhan Pamuk about being put on trial for not denying the Armenian genocide. Mark Lawson remains a wanker, though.
The work of Britney in the age of mechanical reproduction
There’s something wonderfully generic about dance remixes of pop tunes. Any last romantic perceptions of the artist as Genius rigorously dismantled and reassembled into a kind of proletarian music (in the sense of a music without properties). Via Jessica (the popist’s objet petit a), here’s some marvellous examples: “I’m Not a Girl (Not Yet a Woman)” transformed from sincere Dido nonsense to a kind of robotic impersonation of funky house, and a sort of bargain-basement trance version of “Lucky.” That site also has a great electroclash-ish remix of “4ever” by The Veronicas (which was already brilliant enough in its nu-Max original).
Being reminded of “Lucky,” I downloaded the video, which is even better than I remember. Britney playing the role of an actress who is acting in a film who is looking at a reflection of herself in a mirror… I hope Žižek’s seen it, as it appears to be all about the Lacanian account of subjectivity. Perhaps Žižek can be persuaded to follow up his show on films with one on pop videos. And wasn’t watching The Perverts Guide to Cinema a strange experience? Someone with a strong foreign accent (Eastern European, no less), discussing a complex subject in detail with no re-enactments or reality TV trappings or other bullshit—I thought I’d been transported back to the ’70s.
Meanwhile: Britney Spears in the age of biological reproduction.
“A simplistic take on danceable garage rock that anyone could produce if they practiced enough”
Interesting to see the American take on the Arctic Monkeys. It contains the classic k-punk baiting line, “So, are they manufactured? Who gives a shit? What matters is the songs.” And the evocation of grim British life is silly, kind of patronizing, and innacurate. Surely “a world that exists after school discos and without the possibility of university or gainful employment” is more likely to be soundtracked by happy hardcore or terrible trance than by the Arctic Monkeys’ student indie. Still, when the article starts slagging them off, it starts making interesting points:
It’s an interesting tune, actually: a clumsy, repetitive “funk” instrumental that smacks of white kids who’ve had no contact with actual funk—or hip-hop or reggae or dancehall or R&B, for that matter—but who think they ought to be able to do something funky by repeating a riff with a backbeat for three minutes. It raises a question: What would the Arctic Monkeys sound like if they tapped into their locale beyond lyrics, if they took note of Sheffield’s long history of industrial and electronic experimentation?
Where are they now?
Whatever happened to Boom, the S Club 7 of 2-step? And what happened to Brighton based boyband three-piece JAMmed? They had a remarkable gimmick of naming themselves after their initials (I forget what ‘J’ and ‘M’ were actually called; I did wonder if Aaron from V was the same Aaron, it’s very hard to tell boyband members apart). They were even getting props from Simon Fanshawe, yet they vanished without a trace. Perhaps Julie Burchill sabotaged their career.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Inspiration strikes
So, I was listening to the incredible Klezmer/Ska crossover of Klezska, and what may be the best idea I’ve ever had occoured to me. What the world is crying out for is a combination of the kneeling-and-jumping style of cossack dancing with classic running-on-the-spot ska dancing.